The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend by Katarina Bivald
Saturday, September 19, 2015
“One of the most difficult things when you were trying to navigate the world of books was dealing with all the unreliable authors. They were so unbelievably tricky to keep track of. An author might write a brilliant book, only to follow it up with something utterly mediocre. Or, and this was almost worse, one might have written a brilliant book but then turn out to be dead. Then there were those authors who started a series but never finished it.”
My friend and I were walking around a second-hand bookstore in London one day, and I spotted The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend on their New Releases shelf. It looked brand new and it was half the usual price. I have a thing for books about books and so, although I hadn’t heard of this one before, I had to get it.
The book is about a swedish girl called Sara who has a pen pal, the elderly Amy. After having written each other for a while, and Sara having lost her job, she decides to go visit Amy in america for two months. So, Sara sets of for the small town of Broken Wheel, excited to spend two months reading, and talking to Amy about books. When she arrives however, she discovers that Amy has died a few days before, and she is now stuck in the little town, living in Amy’s old house. She slowly gets to know the townspeople, none of whom are readers, and in lack of anything to do, decides to open a bookstore.
This is a really cute book and for the most part i really liked it. The story is told from different point of views, and this along with the theme, reminded me a bit about The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin. Although the main character is Sara, we also follow the story of so many other characters. I usually really like books where we also get to know what happens to the supporting characters, but in this book it just seemed as if there were too many to actually care about all of them.
All of those characters may also be the reason why the book was so long. I really enjoyed the first 200 pages, but after that it just felt like it started to drag out, and it felt a bit repetitive at some points.
Okay, now that I have mentioned the things I didn’t like, I just have to say that for the first 200 pages I absolutely loved this book. Sara is such a relatable character for any booklover, and although she might love books a bit too much, she seems like such a nice person, whom I could easily become best friends with. The rest of the characters are fun and quirky with big personalities, and they really add to the whole small-town feel.
Another thing that I loved was, of course, the constant mentioning of books. Sara has previously worked at a bookstore, and in Broken Wheel she opens her own, so naturally a lot of books will be mentioned. Sara’s own thoughts about a lot of different books are described, and I could definitely relate to some of her opinions, and I also learned about some other books that I hadn’t previously read, but very much want to now. The story does give away spoilers for som of the books that are mentioned, and although it didn’t really bother me, some people might find that irritating.
Have you read The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend? What are your thoughts?
xx - Lene
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